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How do you build tech magic into an artwork that must stand the test of time?
In this episode, Mouna and Melissa are joined by London-based artist and designer Jason Bruges, whose studio has worked at the intersection of architecture, interaction design, and site-specific installation for over 20 years. Recorded in LA on the sidelines of the Global Cultural District Network conference, they discuss how artists working in public space use technology to trick the brain and create enchantment, all while working within the limits of their tools and planning for longevity.
They get into the urban myths and radio call-ins sparked by Jason Bruges’ work along London’s A-13, using tech like paint, and the human fascination with creating artificial impressions of life. This episode is about the wonder and friction that comes with using technology to create out-of-the-ordinary experiences in public space.
Topics covered:
Tech as artistic material, interactive installations, public art, site-specificity, urban storytelling, lumino-kinetic art, maintenance and longevity in public space, design for permanence, artificial life.
Find out more about Jason Bruges Studio:
More about Litmus, by Jason Bruges:
Buy Strangers Need Strange Moments Together, the book:
https://www.setmargins.press/books/strangers-need-strange-moments-together/
https://www.setmargins.press/books/strangers-need-strange-moments-together/
Find Daily tous les jours online:
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Website: https://www.dailytouslesjours.com/en
Creators and Guests
What is Strangers Need Strange Moments Together?
What happens when strangers step outside their routines into unexpected moments of joy and connection? Strangers Need Strange Moments Together is a podcast by art and design studio Daily tous les jours, and the name of our recently published book, documenting our 15 years of experience designing public interactive artworks.
Hosted by co-founders Melissa Mongiat and Mouna Andraos, the podcast dives into the playful, poetic, and often surprising ways we can connect with one another in the built environment. Through conversations with leading voices in design, art, urbanism, and architecture, each episode uncovers how creative gestures, big and small, can re-enchant our cities and invite us to imagine a future we can look forward to. Guests include Jason Bruges and Ilana Altman.
Whether you're a designer, urbanist, artist, or someone craving a deeper connection with your community, this podcast offers a new lens on how we live together.
Hello Stranger, I'm Mouna Andraos.
Melissa Mongiat:And I'm Melissa Mongiat.
Mouna Andraos:We're the co founders of Daily tous les jours, an art and design studio that leads an emergent field of practice combining interactive art, storytelling, performance, and urban design to reimagine the way we live together. This is episode three of Strangers Need Strange Moments Together,
Melissa Mongiat:a podcast based on chapters from our book of the same title.
Mouna Andraos:Today's chapter: On Tricking the Brain and our Imperfect Tools.
Melissa Mongiat:We're in LA with Jason Bruges, a multidisciplinary artist and designer based in London. We all happen to be attending the GCDN conference, and so we have the chance to be together and have a conversation about his work and the in between spaces that both our practices occupy.
Mouna Andraos:Jason's work blends architecture and interaction design, and he uses high-tech mixed media palette to explore spectacle, time based interventions, and dynamic spatial experiences. He's passionate about creating site specific pieces that engage people with their environment.
Melissa Mongiat:And so are we. So thank you for being here.
Jason Bruges:Thank you for the invitation to be here. My name is Jason Bruges. I loosely describe myself as a media artist, pivoted from studying architecture and being an architect of sorts. Prior to that, that kind of foundation is probably DNA. So my mother trained to be an artist and is now an artist again actually.
Jason Bruges:My father was a software engineer and is now actually a consultant, probably using a lot of software. So yeah, you take artist and software engineering, that's kind of my DNA. So that kind of sets the scene.
Melissa Mongiat:And with Peter Cook somewhere in between?
Jason Bruges:Peter Cook at the Bartlett, my postgraduate, very much kind of encouraging lateral thought and really being in an architectural school that looked a lot more like an art school.
Jason Bruges:We had the Slade School of Art next door, but quite frankly you could walk between the two and sometimes not notice much difference obviously, but I'm sure the Slade would probably disagree.
Mouna Andraos:And so what kind of relationship have you kept with architecture after twenty some years?
Jason Bruges:I think there's a lot of architecture in what I do. I describe my canvas as architectural, and by that I mean probably scale, spatial work, site specific work. So I actually I really struggle with a blank canvas. I really struggle with a white box or a black box. So I take cues from the world around me and I take cues from pre existing spaces.
Mouna Andraos:So we were earlier at the workshop, as Melissa mentioned, we're in LA right now at the Global Cultural District Network convening. And so it's exciting to be able to do this in person from Montreal to London. And so you co hosted a workshop earlier and you were talking about how the work that you do needs to express places and sites, even when they maybe travel afterwards. How does that come through? Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Jason Bruges:Absolutely. So I actually showed a very, very early piece of work, which the pieces I describe very loosely as sculptural barometers. There's a piece called Litmus, and there's a series of roundabouts which we have a lot of in The UK which are these kind of funny traffic junctions where you go around them. I was commissioned to create these sculptures, these public artworks that brought these roundabouts to life. They're next to an elevated trunk road, an elevated freeway coming east out of London, and the idea was to create some pieces of work that would respond to what's happening in the environment around them.
Jason Bruges:So test and play back, and it was very much came from the language of overhead signage and devices that sort of measure and play back in that sort of environment. I was thinking about clocks and thermometers and things like that, but what if you disrupt that and you put other numbers into the landscape that mean other things? So I have a series of these essentially 30 to 40 feet high totems that have big alphanumeric displays on them floating in the landscape and they're linked to different things. All completely factual. The tide level of the River Thames at Tilbury, the amount of power being generated by the ecotricity wind turbine on the Ford estate where Ford cars were made, or the number of cars going past.
Jason Bruges:So these things are kind of flickering away, changing, animating their daytime visible, nighttime visible. But their idea about these pieces were these sort of catalysts for discussion around regeneration and change and animation in this environment. But if you're talking about the tide level at the level of the Thames at that point in space and time, that only can exist there, it can't exist anywhere else. And the whole journey, the whole piece was a response to that environment. It's sort of an extraordinary post industrial environment with scrap yards and marshes and motorways and sort of very industrial rivers and sort of interlaced with a little bit of housing and redevelopment.
Jason Bruges:It's quite a industrial kind of environment, but sort of at the edges of London, and it's really very much a sort of commentary on that, but trying to pique people's interest in the fact that the environment is slowly changing.
Melissa Mongiat:Revealing hidden layers that we might not
Jason Bruges:Yeah. Visualizing the invisible, kind of creating this conversation, but very very very site specific. These pieces were kind of sketched into that landscape and they're very much part of it. You could transplant the project somewhere new, but it would take on a different kind of quality, size, scale, composition.
Mouna Andraos:What year was that? How many years ago more or less?
Jason Bruges:So that was inception about 2010 and it was delivered in 2003 or 2004. So it's now just over 20 years old, still there, still running. We've refurbished it once so the displays that float on these 12 meter high towers are still there. So again it's an example of something that's permanent, something that's part of that landscape, it's part of something that people see, grew up with.
Mouna Andraos:So that was gonna be my question, like how so almost twenty years, how does it exist in the site after twenty years, Have the relationships you imagine people would have with it, did they unfold? Did the neighbourhood change? Does it still kind of reflect?
Jason Bruges:Some the bits about the neighbourhood are the same and other bits have probably changed wildly. Development's happened, houses have been built, new roads have been built, but essentially the context of the sites is quite similar. It's a project that has longevity, it's not meant to go away.
Mouna Andraos:And what do you know about people's relationship with it?
Jason Bruges:One of the things that happened really early on with the project, which was really lovely and it also probably talks to the time when it was invented and the inception of the piece, there were phone ins to the local radio station about what these things were and what they were doing, and people were sort of implying there were certain relationships to these pieces and that they were spelling out football scores or the speed you were going. And people were like kind of like making up stories around what these things were doing. And that happened twice. I kind of heard on different occasions. I had it reported to me that happened twice.
Jason Bruges:The Robert Elms radio show on one of BBC channels.
Mouna Andraos:Unrequested, like they just
Jason Bruges:Yeah, people phoning up. We've seen these kind of strange interventions, these sculptures on the A13. I was driving home from work and it was saying five twenty four, what does that mean? I'm not sure, it's not my speed, it's not this, it's not that. So these sort of urban myths being created, I love when that happens.
Jason Bruges:I love that happens around art, I love that when it happens around buildings, motifs, gateways, icons, when things get names. It's just it's part of I love it when you provoke that sort sort of creativity within a sort of populace.
Melissa Mongiat:We talk about enchantment and magic and that's like true enchantment when people wonder what is the code behind or if this is real or how does it relate back to their life.
Jason Bruges:And it comes back to that whole thing about do you create interpretation? And there are somewhere in the undergrowth probably plaques next to these pieces that say, you know, Litmus, what it is. 2003, Jason Bruges studio, etcetera etcetera etcetera. But it's this sort of debate and inquiry and curiosity that for me, that happens, it's a success.
Melissa Mongiat:I was curious about do you you remember the first time it happens that it was a clear sign that you should not do architecture and this was the field that you were going to pursue?
Jason Bruges:The journey, I mean, me deciding to do architecture was very much a logical response to things I enjoyed. I was very technical, I enjoyed maths, I enjoyed physics a lot. And I think choosing those meant I couldn't do art. An obvious route when you're sort of creative, but you also like the kind of science and you're really technical is architecture will be the thing. And my tutor choosing those meant I couldn't do a wannabe architect.
Jason Bruges:So I started building up a portfolio which is what you do when you want to go to architecture school drawing, painting, doing all the things that you do, a foundation course or you do when you're doing your art courses at school, but I did it my own time. Self taught.
Mouna Andraos:It worked.
Jason Bruges:So managed to create a portfolio that persuaded me to get in, I went to a sort of quite a traditional architectural school in Oxford, where there's a lot of people who had parents were architects and they kind of lived and breathed architecture for a long time and for me it was a really new thing. But even then, I was kind of getting to the point where I realized that my response to architecture was quite different. So every time we were asked to do something, I'd do it in a kind of weird way. It's like, go and make a model of a building, and everyone would go away and make it in clay or foam board. I'd come back with a sort of clear Perspex model.
Jason Bruges:Or I end up doing a performance based piece. We built a performance base in quadrangle of the college. I built a musical instrument out of a washing machine. I sampled sounds from it.
Melissa Mongiat:They loved you. That's a big sign right there.
Jason Bruges:So I cut a washing machine apart, exploded it across a room as a sort of living axonometric, but the whole thing still worked. Highly dangerous. Didn't
Mouna Andraos:It worked.
Jason Bruges:The drums still span and things happened. And I sampled sounds from different parts of it.
Melissa Mongiat:Dangerous music.
Jason Bruges:Dangerous music, highly dangerous. You would not be allowed to do that in art school today or architecture. Then my final piece was an immersive media artwork, this is in 1994, my final piece was an immersive piece of work that was in response to a piece of classical music. I built the floor out of a whole matrix of milk bottles, and I had UV guns that turned them into this blue sea, and then I had a wall of cathode ray tubes, it was sort of extracts from some kind of opera, and this whole thing was this immersive space. Purely analog or using technology at that time, not a computer in sight, but very very much an immersive mixed media piece. That was one of the pieces that gave me my degree as an architect.
Mouna Andraos:They still gave it to you, it's good.
Jason Bruges:Oh yeah, I got a very high mark and it was all very good. And then I worked as an architect. Went and found a job in Hong Kong working for Norman Foster, working on the airport. Learned how to be an architect and produce buildings. It was all really useful if you want to make things.
Jason Bruges:It's like do you work with information? How do you create specifications? How do you complicate technical drawings? All this sort of thing. Then I came back to my postgraduate, which was under Peter Cook at the Bartlett.
Jason Bruges:So, again, you've got this guy who's telling me about buildings that walk. He's telling me about buildings that lift up their skirts. He's telling me about performance. You know, performative things. That was one thing.
Jason Bruges:We'd go on field trips with my tutor Stephen Gage, and he'd take us to people building robots. We'd go to kind of geeky sort of tech conferences full of people from cyberneticians, people who were exploring UX design before UX design existed. I mean we were looking at things that were like interaction design. Interaction design wasn't coined till two years after I finished, well a year after I think I finished my diploma in Masters. But we were looking at human computer interaction in architectural space, We're mapping people's movements, we're building machines, we're building kind of interfaces and art installations and all sorts of things.
Jason Bruges:So really my postgraduate work at architectural school was very much a precursor to what I'm doing now.
Mouna Andraos:So there's obviously, you know, a lot of your work, if not all of it is tech empowered for lack of a better word. And with Melissa at Daily tous les jours, a lot of our work is as well. And sometimes I have cold sweats in the middle of the night of putting that stuff out there and the pressure of permanence and the realities of who the hosts are and what their ability to maintain these things are gonna be. How do you manage that or deal with that? Is that a question you ask yourself?
Melissa Mongiat:From the dangerous washing machine to actual public space!
Jason Bruges:So, I mean, very early on, so in the early days of the studio I would build and code and make and fabricate and assemble myself, and I could probably hack together most things myself in a couple of days. But I even knew at that point in time I knew what my limitations were. So as soon as I needed a fit for purpose sort of design for manufacture or a version that could be put on a wall and left there for ten years. I was like okay I need someone that can make that kind of circuit for me that will do that. But I was able to draw what I wanted and describe it of fact to So be working as an I'd write as performance specification, a brief.
Jason Bruges:I'd do a set of technical drawings and hand it over to two or three people. I'd have built a version myself, but I'd say, right, I need to now create the final version of it, and I would outsource that. But that was me working my own home very early days of the studio. But then as time progressed, I realized that we could do I could do a lot of those things within the studio if I hired the right people. So I started to build up a team that would like making a film has all the kind of requisite skills of all the people making that film.
Jason Bruges:So you've got this long list of people, so I end up building that list of people.
Mouna Andraos:And expertise.
Jason Bruges:And expertise for a studio that, again, I practiced learning and understanding what I was actually doing. Realized I was doing commissioned art, that was mixed media, that had quite a highly technical background. So I started to build my own, I suppose, team that was the equivalent of that kind of, you know, your credits in a film, my version of that.
Melissa Mongiat:At the studio there was this game changing moment when we started to have a monitor, a platform that monitors all the projects kind of in one place and gathers the data and is able to compare and to hold all the projects around the world together in one place. Did you have a similar moment where you kind of build a vision and you realise how one project can help another as you start to understand them through the days and through the seasons?
Jason Bruges:I think more and more we have systems where, you know, certain things will work in the same way. So, if we are saying that these are external parameters changing what happens within the system, So like it's weather, for example, which is kind of a nice thing we all reference, you know, what the sunlight hours are or the temperature or the wind direction. We all have the luxury of having these things in real time, and obviously you do that enough times, you know what type of API to build or to reference, and and you can have bits of the kind of collage which you can repeat because but you're still exploring something quite different. So it's, again, there are a lot of bespoke projects that are highly crafted to suit a certain scenario and a site, and they're very specific. They're highly bespoke, there's lots of custom elements, there's lots of kind of brand new elements, there's innovations, first in class research.
Jason Bruges:But you do start going okay to de risk us a bit and to understand how this project works there's bits of the operating system bits of things we're talking to that we've done before otherwise it's almost impossible.
Mouna Andraos:Yeah it's too much.
Jason Bruges:Or super risky.
Melissa Mongiat:In itself.
Mouna Andraos:And so what's your relationship as an artist with tech and when does it come into your creative process?
Jason Bruges:Tech is my paint at the end of the day.
Mouna Andraos:You still play, you still get your hands dirty or
Jason Bruges:I certainly do. Yeah. Yeah. So tech is my paint. It it's part of my palette.
Jason Bruges:It's part of the things I can use, but I don't start a project going, I'm gonna use red paint.
Melissa Mongiat:Mhmm.
Jason Bruges:So it's like, I'll start a project going, this is about anger, and therefore I might use red paint. But it's not the other round. So it's about a kind of an an idea. I'm doing a project at the moment which is kind of just finished. This is about water falling, and it's about all the qualities of falling water and why it's good for you.
Jason Bruges:It looks at everything from the negative to why there's certain arcs and shapes in water trigger certain neurological responses in you. And all of that is coming together, but the idea was there first and then how we've sculpted a 40 foot vertical sculpted media surface that's built from scratch, it's sculptural and structural. That all came after the idea of creating this illusion of this this 3D media sort of impression of falling water. How that was created came after the idea. So to just give an example.
Melissa Mongiat:And does the final pen include a robot? There are many robots.
Jason Bruges:So that project doesn't include any robotics that I'm aware of
Melissa Mongiat:Every time we see photos of the Zen Garden in Japan, there's so many tingles.
Jason Bruges:I mean, robots were something that I was very interested in when you looked at moving buildings and any research you did in transformable spaces. And, again, looking at inferences like Cedric Price or I'm trying to remember some of the Japanese references I've used before. Early robotics to transform space essentially. Essentially some form of highly articulate actuator that moves things around architecturally, essentially is a form of robotics. I'd been thinking about that for probably twenty to thirty years before I did the Constant Gardeners.
Jason Bruges:So the idea of a robotics transforming space and robotic performance was something that had been going round and round in my head. So when this first manifested itself both in Where Do We Go From Here for The UK City Of Culture in Hull or Constant Gardeners in Tokyo for Tokyo 2020, realised in 2021. That again is just part of a palette. Work you could describe within this media space, could describe the work as luminokinetic probably. So there is movement when I can afford it and when I can make it work.
Jason Bruges:Robotics are kind of a means, sort of a means to end. I'm more interested in the fact that I can create movement and I can create an impression of perhaps a living system or something that's kind of highly articulate and animate. I'm pretty less interested in what the robot is saying more interested in what the kind of output is and the choreography that comes from that.
Mouna Andraos:So we started with the kind of chapter of the book and that expression we use which is tricking our brain and imperfect tools. So that relates a little bit. I imagine the robots were not without their quirks, right? And so how do you work with the limitations of the tech? Is that something that comes into play in the creative process?
Jason Bruges:Absolutely. I mean, artists have always been constrained by, I go back to the paint actually, because paint is a useful starting point pigment and ranges of gamma or hue in paint systems has always been something that have basically created parameters for artists to work in. So therefore, and that's why artists obviously are always kind of there's an inquiry around the range of colour you might just have in a certain type of paint I. E. Why blue was something that was really hard to get certain types of blue, and why when someone does make a kind of discovery Yves Klein with Yves Klein Blue, that's why there are moments like that or why there are fascination with blacks and blacks that absorb a lot of light like Vantablack.
Jason Bruges:And that whole discovery and pushing of technology around things, I talk about paint because really using media, using robotics, using light, using screens, using assemblages of materials, using composites, using smart materials are purely for me types of paint. So I just see the exploration about what those things can do if you're essentially turning paint on and off and moving around you're doing something that's lumino kinetic. So essentially I've got smart paint and I'm moving it in space. And if it's not on a flat surface it then becomes sculptural and spatial. I'm really interested in the ability of that palette to create the illusion of life.
Jason Bruges:And really, if I asked to boil down what I'm interested in, and again it's taken me a while to work out what I'm most interested in, is this impression of life. And therefore I spend a lot of time looking at the natural world, both the kind of environmental world and the people world, and how they sit together. The work is impressions and abstractions of that. So I am essentially creating impressions of life.
Mouna Andraos:Obviously, leads us to a question on everyone's mind these days, which is AI and AI in art. And I think what you're referring to, the impressions of life are are more about us humans and how we project our human qualities to the world around us and and see that.
Jason Bruges:Yeah. You you don't need much in the way of AI to create impressions or illusions of life.
Mouna Andraos:Yeah.
Jason Bruges:And, you know, We have been doing this for centuries and we've been fascinated by it. So automaton, automata, right through to puppetry, right to theatre, magic, all of these things are about, again as you're saying, tricking your mind and creating illusions and things. And again even going back to paintings, when you're talking about Impressionism, we're talking about illusions as well. We're talking about creating versions of real life.
Jason Bruges:And I suppose I kind of look back and go, I'm interested in these versions of life. I'm interested in these versions of things that are living. And quite often there'll be things that make us feel in certain ways. So like going back to the idea of water, water has a whole series of effects on us and obviously that's why people were captivated by it in all its forms. People have been captivated by clouds, people have been captivated about creating real clouds now, people are captivated by sea, people are captivated by waves.
Jason Bruges:I'm talking about people as in artists.
Mouna Andraos:Yeah.
Jason Bruges:Or And
Mouna Andraos:communities, right?
Jason Bruges:And and obviously communities and the observers and the and people that enjoy art. But essentially so if you can find ways, yeah, that's a curiosity that sits within my head is essentially finding ways to recreate a system that is essentially alive.
Melissa Mongiat:And how much is storytelling kind of a tool to trick? Because the brain often... kind of our storytelling brain or narrative brains kind of complete often what's missing with the tech.
Jason Bruges:Yeah. I probably am a storyteller, but as you as you're saying, I probably create a quite an abstract narrative to build that construct. So if I'm developing something that is talking about a water environment and creating something that is taking me on a journey, for me, a story might be just changes in intensity, which, you know, builds a kind of, I suppose, a story arc or a kind of changing of kind of intensity, a changing of experience. So therefore, the story is extremely abstract, but it does have at times of low intensity and high intensity. And it's highly planned, but it doesn't look like it's a plan.
Jason Bruges:It's just kind of very, very abstract storytelling. And I suppose it's like saying that someone that paints very, very photorealistically perhaps is telling a very kind of detailed story within the frame versus someone that is painting incredibly abstractly is probably still telling a story, but you're relying a lot more on the observer to read into that and build a story in their brain based on perhaps imagine you're looking at a Rothko and you're looking at kind of three bands of color or two bands of color and that's creating an impression of a world or a scenario or a thought or a mood or a piece of music depending on how your brain's wired. But a lot of that is left to the observer to try and work out and deal with. And I suppose I'm interested in that as well and hence my comment earlier actually in the workshop where for me the audience is part of the work.
Melissa Mongiat:And the space, maybe more space for visceral attachment and reactions when it's more open?
Jason Bruges:Yeah. Multi sensorial, you're receiving an impression of a space or an effect or a scenario, but you're not being told exactly what it is.
Melissa Mongiat:Anyways, we never know what it really is.
Mouna Andraos:I was laughing earlier because Ellen and Claire at the studio were helping us in prepping this. And so they put down some questions and they were like, got to ask Jason, are we at Daily dinosaurs of tech with our sensors and our Arduinos? Are we missing out sticking to basics? I mean, we're exploring other stuff, but I thought that was a fun question.
Jason Bruges:No, certainly not tech dinosaurs.
Mouna Andraos:How important is it to push.
Jason Bruges:But What I do love though is how ubiquitous the single board prototyping computer is, which I think is really lovely and really interesting. And again, for me, I don't actually really care what type of embedded computing you use because actually an Arduino can do an awful lot of things. It might be if you want a piece to run fifty years, perhaps I might not rely on an Arduino. Perhaps I might actually, I don't know. Again, it's I mean, it depends what you're doing.
Jason Bruges:We'll create a kind of brief of perhaps the technology or the type of paint you're using or the canvas you're creating. I mean, it's like saying, you know, you painting onto paper and and pinning it onto the wall or you paint onto a canvas? I mean, it's the same conversation. Does it really matter for the impression of what you're seeing? Well, it might do.
Jason Bruges:It it may well do. But at the end of the day, if I was creating a painting and the canvas is just something, it's a technique of presenting that differently, it's probably gonna create an impression, it'd probably be flatter.
Mouna Andraos:Yeah. It will set up a canvas. Right?
Jason Bruges:But, you know, whether that's a completely bespoke hardware system that we built from scratch or it's a named off the shelf system, I don't think it kinda matters, or whether the whole thing's being run from a media server in another room. I think you're just talking about different types of systems and it's I don't think it it matters. I mean, it's like people will say, what kind of software do you use to develop the 3D look of something? What kind of software do you use to emulate how something might behave? Are you using TouchDesigner, are you using Cinema 4D , are you still working in don't know.
Mouna Andraos:What's some old platform?
Jason Bruges:Are you sketching within a VR headset? How are you developing an idea of a behavior or an animation or something? Again, it doesn't really matter. Again, it's just tools. The idea and the kind of concept and how it's working, it's the important bits.
Melissa Mongiat:For our practitioners in the world of technology, I think the question of maintenance is always important and not talked about enough. Do you have a special take on maintenance and care?
Jason Bruges:Maintenance is super important. Or avoiding it in the first place. Building things that are really robust. Testing, testing, testing, failing early, iterating. Creating things that are highly efficient.
Jason Bruges:So building systems that just do one thing really, really well. But, yeah, testing and prototyping are the key things that you can do with pretty much any installation, even down to the methodology of how something's installed, how it comes together. It's like anything in life, whether it's a presentation or building a sculpture or creating a media installation, the more times you kind of experiment and the more failures you have earlier on and the more iterations you can create and the more prototypes you can do, it might make it quite an expensive process but at least the thing you deliver, you'll be a lot less surprised and it's likely to last longer.
Mouna Andraos:And it's true definitely, but the prototyping and the testing get harder when you consider weather and external conditions and wear and tear and stuff like that? Do you do lab experimentations, try to accelerate the process?
Jason Bruges:We do accelerate weather testing. We've done work in places like Toronto with free saw cycles and things like that.
Mouna Andraos:That you don't.
Jason Bruges:Yeah, do full blown weather testing. We obviously do software testing, so we can look at thermals, we can look at joints, both with the architectural members of the team in the studio. So I've got 25 people, as I mentioned, with all these different skills. So we might be looking at architectural detailing, we might be looking at things from a design engineering point of view, so design for manufacture. So we're looking at we will be 3D printing things, we'll be doing precision injection molding, we'll be developing things as if they're products.
Jason Bruges:So that is something I realized, again, quite early on, that my architectural skills of detailing things are quite good for some fairly rudimentary detailing, weatherproofing, water detailing, all those sorts of things. You know about humidity, you know about cold points, know about dew points, you know about insulation, you know about ventilation, you know all these things you need to do to keep a box dry like essentially a building. Even a small box outside is like a building, so there's all these things that I can tell you about. You know, Jason why's it got a hole there. Why can't air go through it?
Jason Bruges:Well, that's all to do with, you know, the difference of inside and outside and the humidity and all these things. But to get really good at that, it's like, well, let's pretend this is a product, and we're gonna make lots and lots of these. And therefore, you really gotta think about everything within this.
Melissa Mongiat:Is scaling part of the answer? Doing more of the same so that you can
Jason Bruges:If you are doing work that's kinetic or is in a really difficult environment, the more iterations and versions you have for something, the better it will get completely. So, I know artists that are doing only kinetic work and a lot of it, and the golden rules are just to create modules and make thousands of them and get very, very good at just making one thing, unfortunately. You to put work out there that's got a life that is deemed reasonable, and by reasonable, I mean, our rule system is we create work that matches the buildings it goes into. So building twenty years, twenty five years. So we're looking at twenty, twenty five year design life for most of our pieces of work.
Melissa Mongiat:With a spare parts strategy.
Jason Bruges:Spare parts strategy. We build basic maintenance manuals or we have a manual that goes with a piece of work. When you design a building, you have to issue a set of drawings that describe that building as it was built. We do the same thing with our work essentially. You've the manual, but you've also got all the drawings, the specifications, the warranties passed over, defects periods, everything built into that kind of contract set of drawings essentially.
Mouna Andraos:As part of the work and the behind the scenes, right? So twenty five years, should all public art kind of aspire for that duration or?
Jason Bruges:It I mean the duration, the lifespan, the life cycle that public art should go through at least. Yeah. It should be longer. I mean like we look at bronze statues that have been around two hundred years and it's a bit tidying up occasionally but they kind of weather really nicely I have a pattern there there's a quality to them.
Mouna Andraos:But sometimes they tell the wrong stories, we need to take them down.
Jason Bruges:Yeah, then they get thrown off the edge into , yeah.
Mouna Andraos:So maybe it's too pretentious to think that we can create the public art of two hundred years from now. What's the normal warranty for a swing? Not two hundred.
Jason Bruges:Personally just think that the level of investment means I think work should have a reasonable kind of lifespan. And I think everything we're looking at for good practice will I mean with my design and architecture hat on is you're looking at kind of designing for permanence and you are looking at twenty years.
Mouna Andraos:Yeah longevity.
Jason Bruges:Yeah. Is challenging, know? It's not it's not easy. It's not in a gallery, it's not a sort of temporary thing. It's it's got to stand the test of time.
Jason Bruges:It's got to be maintainable. The right to repair is really important now. So if someone else repairs it, can they?
Melissa Mongiat:Yeah, and there are different types of contexts, like different types of buildings with different types of teams. Sometimes there's no expertise on-site to properly care. Now, it's complex but it's worth it. You thought you were done after our talk. Really?
Jason Bruges:No, it's good. So maintenance is super important for work because there's nothing worse than seeing work not maintained. It's not good for anyone.
Jason Bruges:Other practitioners.
Mouna Andraos:Because it's not good for them, for all of us.
Jason Bruges:It's not good for anyone to actually have work out there that's not working. Because then you get clients that go, well, we've already got some media artworks, they're broken and we can't get parts for them.
Melissa Mongiat:Yeah. Yeah. Or even for the field. Right? Like, oh, no. Interactive artworks don't work.
Melissa Mongiat:Thank you so much for your time, Jason.
Jason Bruges:No problem. I'm glad to be of assistance.
Mouna Andraos:This was Strangers Need Strange Moments Together.
Melissa Mongiat:Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe.
Mouna Andraos:And check the episode description for links to follow us online and to order your own copy of the book. Another episode is coming soon.
Mouna Andraos:We can't wait to announce our next guest.
Melissa Mongiat:Special thanks to Michael Baker and Claire Lecker.